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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any good data on the prevalence of ad blocking? The headline number in this article ($887 million) is a pure guess, based on an estimate of 10% of users using ad blocking. They provide absolutely no evidence or reasoning behind this guess. End result: All of their attention-grabbing numbers are pure conjecture and speculation.

There must be users on here who run some high volume sites who can share what % of ads are blocked, surely?

(edit: the linked http://blog.pagefair.com/2013/destructoid-not-alone/ does give more background into some sample sites and adblocking %s, but more numbers and real world data would be good)

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We're using 10% as a very conservative estimate actually. We've been measuring adblock data for 9 months now across several hundred sites, many of which are very large. The current average blockrate across all these publishers is 26.1%. These are the guys who are so acutely affected that they signed up to us in the first place, but it gives you a good idea.

A fair estimate of a minimum value is the block rate on sites that are non-techie, e.g., lifestyle (12% blockrate) and news (16% blockrate).

We'll be doing another post soon revealing all these numbers and our methodology in collecting them in detail.

Good point about the rate varying a lot based on the audience - I imagine that tech sites have it worst for blocking rates.

I wonder how the rates vary for tablet/mobile viewing? I'd guess fewer users manage to block ads on these devices?

The rate is actually highest on gaming-related sites. I guess that audience is usually sufficiently technical, and is also habitually bombarded with aggressive advertising.

Oh, and blocking rates on mobile/tablet is very low, probably consisting of ISP-level adblocking. That will shortly change though - the adblock community is hard at work creating mobile versions.

Have any of your customers used the metrics they gleaned to size up an ad-blocker white-listing offer themselves?

Not so far as we are aware. Not many sites have gone down the whitelisting route, for the kind of reasons discussed in the post above. That said, lots of our customers are discovering just how badly they are affected. Some sites have more than 64% of their visitors blocking their ads, and are facing extinction.

The metrics you provide are certainly useful in putting low ad-revenue in some context for a business.

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